Fullyes Intel i430VX P55C motherboard - I managed to find a bios update for this board on the internet archive! It is now version '2.7' (was 2.5). I had to change a jumper on the bios to enable reprogram mode
512kb cache (256kb onboard plus 256kb expansion!)
Amd k6/2 450. This cpu should not work in this board. (Bios says it's a 486 DX/S 66) but due to a unique multiplier interpretation in the k6/2 it interprets 2x66 as 6x66 so runs at 400MHz! The maximum speed the board should support is 233MHz (From the pentium MMX range)
Min voltage the board supports is 2.5V, the chip is rated at 2.4V. Close enough!
64mb edo ram (max supported cacheable is 64mb, but will take 128mb - not sure what would happen to performance if I stuck another 64mb in there.)
Geforce 2 mx 32mb - severely bottlenecked by system bus!
Sound blaster awe 64 gold
6.4gb hd
16x dvd-rom

I took the voodoo2 out as it conflicted with my PCI USB add in card. The board pre-dates usb.

Some kind of weird short circuit killed my psu and fried my internal speaker. I don't think the internal speaker hardware on the motherboard works anymore. So no more bios beep!

this pic is from a few years back. Before I got my AWE64. Full length AWE 32! I think the Graphics card is a Geforce4 MX420 which I sent back because I thought it was faulty. Turned out it was bad nvidia drivers. The later detonator drivers had some issues running on old hardware, but period drivers worked great (I had the same issue with the geforce 2 I got after it)

I think this cooler is for a socket A K7. I had to bend the pins for the HDD LED to get it to fit. But this is a vastly superior cooler now than what any socket 7 chip came with. The k6/2s were quite bad for running hot. I didn't want to take any chances with the over volting! Also managed to hide the HDD cables under the motherboard. I am a fan of cable management when possible!

My first build was the system above. I bought the board for £15 second hand in early 1998 when I was 15. When I first built it around the fullyes motherboard it had a Pentium 75 (O/c'd to 100MHz ) 32Mb SDRAM, Cirrus logic 5446 2mb pci vga card and an audio excel sound blaster compatible sound card, 2.1gig HDD and a 12x CD-ROM drive!

Because this rig kinda sucked I bought a new processor for it. I didn't know much about processors at the time, so I Bought a cyrix M2 PR233. Now I think with hindsight I could've got this chip to work on the fullyes board, but when I first tried it is said it was a 486. I didn't have the manual for the fullyes board at the time so I was unable to set the jumpers correctly (I set up the P75 purely by guesswork!)

What was 'great' about this motherboard was the amount of features it packed. Onboard sound, video, usb, IR. Fitted both AT and ATX cases, it was a real do-all board at the time. It supported high multipliers and FSB frequencies above 66MHz (but not 100MHz) So you had quite a lot of overclocking options. 75MHz FSB was a good setting, it oc/d the chipset though (PCI/ISA buses), so you had to be careful to not push it too far.

What the website doesn't tell you is if you don't want to use the on-board sound you can't use an add-in sound card in dos. It causes some kind of hardware conflict even when you disable it in the bios and with the jumper on the motherboard. Which wasn't good for me as I still played a fair few dos games, like first encounters and I wanted to use a decent sound card. I think I had a PCI64 at the time (Still got it!)

The biggest problem with this board though is it's memory performance. The fullyes board even when using EDO ram could run rings around this, even when you ran the M571 at 75MHz with SD-RAM.

Real world performance isn't too bad. If you run it at 75MHz you get a nice boost in graphics card performance. I did some comparisons with 3dmark 99 a few years ago and it was better than the fullyes board by quite a bit, I could also run the CPU at the full 450MHz and it supports more ram

So really, in most respects this is a better board than my old one, but being unable to use a proper sound card was a deal breaker for me. So now it sits in its box in the attic as my backup should I ever need it. I hope that I never will!

I only discovered all this more recently. I used this board for about a year before I moved on to an Aladdin V chipset MSI board which supported 100MHz FSB and AGP (to some extent, but not very well).

I just found this pic of the aladdin V MSI board. I think it was model MS5169. Pictured with a graphics blaster TNT2 M64 16mb, and a geforce 4 MX 440 64mb (great card!)

So my third rig consisted of this board paired with the K6/2 450 that's now in my fullyes rig. 128MB PC100 SD-RAM 6.4gig hdd and the TNT2 M64 pictured. (this pic is from a few years ago now, I think the M64 went in the bin when it developed a fault. It always ran red hot due to being only passively cooled)

I spent ages trying to get the graphics blaster to run at AGP 2x on the aladdin board. I think the card supported 4x but AGP implementaion on socket 7 motherboards always sucked. So it never ran at anything other than 1x. Still, this was twice as fast as PCI.

I actually had two of these MSI board. The first was DOA which I then exchanged for an iWill motherboard of a similar design. This lasted about 6 months until I killed it with a bad bios flash. So I had to save my pennies for a month til I could afford to buy another board.

The TNT2 M64 sucked so bad I ended up taking this out of my old rig (which I had given to my brother at this point and have fogotten to mention this card so far!)

The other motherboard is a Jetway 663AS Pro (yeah, I know jetway! ) . And toether with the MX 440 made up my 4th rig. It was my first computer to break 1GHz. Running a 1.2GHz athlon Thunderbird

My 5th and final retro rig isn't really what I would call retro but it seems to have been talked about a few times in this thread so I will add it in the interests of completeness!

System was built around the nforce 2 based A7N8X-X. This was the cheaper single channel memory controller version of the A7N8X, which wasn't really that big a deal back then.

This was quite possibly the best (certainly longest lasting) system I ever owned. I bought it in 2003 and I think I replaced it in 2008 without upgrading the CPU. I somehow bought a very unusual high end Thoroughbred B cpu

As you can see it operated at 2250MHz from the factory and the multiplier was unlocked! It didn't really matter that the multiplier was unlocked though as it was easier to increase the fsb. With some corsair value select ram I was able to clock the FSB/RAM all the way to 225MHz stable (it would post and bench higher but 225 was a nice round number and stable for everyday stuff)

I had quite a few graphics cards in this rig over those 5 years. My first was an FX5200. Worst. Card. Ever! I then got a 5600 instead. Which worked for a while 'til the fan died on it. Then I saw the light and had a couple of ATI cards.

This is an X800GT. The first graphics card I ever really experimented with overclocking on. (retrospectively, I overclocked the Geforce 4 mx440 and it loved it) but the X800GT was my first. I killed it somehow trying to unlock an extra quad. I ended up with one less quad than when I started So then I got this:

It's an X1950GT 256mb. With hindsight the Pro 512 would have been a much better choice but I loved this card. It looked great

So that's all the rigs I built for myself between 1998 and 2003. I had a brief flirtation with socket 939 after this but I then went over to intel and had a Q6600 setup before my current one. For quite a while there, I was a total AMD fanboy!

I've got some more retro rigs that I acquired over the years that I will be posting about next. Including the slot a system I got a few weeks back

This is supposed to be 'the best' socket 7 motherobard you could get. It's an FIC VA-503+ It has a whopping 1Mb of L2 and can cache up to 256mb of ram! I found it a few years ago in an old machine at wok. Unfortunately I could never get it to run stable so I haven't used it much.

This is a budget celeron 733 setup

I built this machine last year when I was having a bad time with my modern stuff. My laptop and PC both died within days of one another. So in the interim I threw this machine together. The parts I got from old machines at work (the box originally housed the celeron system above) The motherboard I found in a motherboard box for a socket 775 motherboard (I was somewhat dissapointed to find that it was infact a PCchips M810L v9.0m from circa 2003

This is a very strange motherboard in that the 1266MHz duron CPU and 256mb of ram is soldered directly to the motherboard. So no CPU upgrades! Any AGP card i tried also caused issues (possibly because of the 120w PSU ) so I had to use the onboard with a whopping 8mb of ram

There are other versions of this board that are actually pretty good. (ones with a ZIF socket for the CPU support upto 2133MHz athlon XPs). But not this one!

K7 rig

I fired this up today. It runs great! It has dual boot for some reason. Both boot options are for 'windows xp'

I just found out about this great thread.
I have lots of old hardware, starting from the XT times (I think my XT would still work if I would give it power). 286,-386 motherboards and processors, Tseng VGA cards, etc... a lot of money spent on things which are only useless junks now They are locked up in storage atm, but I will take some pics next time for you guys)

Here are some what I have it with me now (don't ask me why I dug these up, because I don't remember)

1, my first 3dfx card. I had a devkit earlier at work, but this was mine

2, Some IO card (IDE,FFD,COM,LPT) with Goldstar chips on it.

3, Sound Blaster (Vibra 16) sound card

4, Gravis sound card (Doom music was awesome with this)

5, Matrox Millenium graphics card (Iirc the thing on the right is extra 4MB)

6, Diamond's Edge 3D (my first Nvidia card. It was very expensive and utterly slow, but I could connect Sega gamepads to it at least.)

I just found out about this great thread.
I have lots of old hardware, starting from the XT times (I think my XT would still work if I would give it power). 286,-386 motherboards and processors, Tseng VGA cards, etc... a lot of money spent on things which are only useless junks now They are locked up in storage atm, but I will take some pics next time for you guys)

Here are some what I have it with me now (don't ask me why I dug these up, because I don't remember)

Nice stuff posted today. Much of it is from an era I mostly don't have hardware from any longer. I used to have a Packard Bell S606. P233, 32MB EDO, 4GB Maxtor, some variation of SB and a ATI Rage card of some sort.

After reading how bad most PBs were, looks like I got lucky with that machine. Never had a problem with it. Lost it in a move probably 10 years ago.

I had some similar ram to that, it was PC4400. Got it off a guy on here (maybe Tatty_One) together with an opteron 185. Shame I never really had the board for it (the board for it appeared to be an asrock 939Dual-SATA2) but I always got outbid on ebay for one. The A8N SLI deluxe I had instead was rubbish. (for O/Cing anyway)